Commercial blue-sky research lives on at IBM’s Watson center

50 years on, IBM's research labs still get to think in terms of decades.

The entry to IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, located about an hour north of New York City.

John Timmer

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY – In the decades following World War II, the US emerged as the leading center of scientific research through the efforts of three types of institutions: its research universities, national labs like Fermi and Livermore, and commercial research institutes like Bell Labs and Xerox's PARC. Each type brought something distinct to the table. Academics could work on basic science that had no obvious commercial value. The national labs could build resources that no single university could ever afford. And the commercial labs allowed their researchers to think long-term without the need to constantly search for grant money.

Fifty years later, all of these are struggling. In an era of government cutbacks, the national labs can't think quite as big, while academic researchers now seem to spend more time writing grants than they do performing actual research. But the change has been most dramatic at the commercial labs, which, to an extent, no longer exist. Bell Labs is still open, but its parent company has been split up, merged, and is struggling to remain profitable. PARC just celebrated its 50th anniversary, but now relies on grants and contract work, while functioning a bit like a startup incubator.

But the commercial labs may not be so much dead as an endangered species. I was privileged to visit one of the few surviving members of the kind: IBM's Watson Research Center, one of the company's major research labs (there are 11 others, including ones in Zurich and California). If most of the public is familiar with Watson at all, it's probably due to its recent creation, the eponymous Jeopardy-playing computer (which is now sitting in a server room, with only a few lights and a glass wall denoting its history). But the center has just celebrated 50 years at its current location, and played host to many significant researchers during that time.

Enlarge/ Only a bit of glass and some LEDs indicate Watson's status as a Jeopardy champion.

John Timmer

Watson isn't a pure research center, in the sense that academic institutes usually allow their staff to work on anything they can can get funding for. Although there is some overlap with academia—some of the Watson staff have joint appointments with nearby academic institutions—its employees are expected to focus their research on areas where IBM has expertise, and the goal is definitely to create something that can eventually be turned into a product.

The thing that makes Watson distinctive is the time frame of that "eventually." The people at Watson get to think in terms of decades, a window that's practically unheard of in the current corporate environment.

The high-performance computing of tomorrow—today!

To give some examples of how this works, it's easiest to look at some of the research projects that I was able to see during our visit. Although it's no longer in the PC business, IBM has maintained a strong focus in high-performance computing and runs a major fabrication facility. So, on a high level, IBM is very interested in ways to make sure it remains competitive in these areas.

With clock speed advances having slowed considerably even as cores have gone up, connections among system components like memory and RAM are playing larger roles in system performance. IBM has also made a major business out of selling clusters, like the Blue Gene systems, and the performance there depends on the interconnects between systems. A team at Watson has been working under the assumption that the optical connections currently used for longer interconnects will scale down until they are used to link system components.

Since these interconnects will need to be integrated with the system components themselves, IBM launched a research program about a decade ago, one that leveraged its capabilities with silicon fabrication. In recent years, it's been able to etch waveguides and optical switches out of silicon, allowing them to be fabbed as part of the same package as any other chip (the laser light is supplied externally). Now, the researchers involved think that they'll be ready to market products in the next few years.

In the same way, IBM is preparing for the time when it runs into limits on etched silicon, which most people are expecting within the next decade. To that end, it's experimenting with various ways to use carbon nanotubes in transistors, but that work has a much longer time window than the silicon optics. Further out still, Watson Research Center hosts groups working on quantum computers, but it's focusing on components that can be produced with the company's fab technology, rather than ion traps or other options.

This focus on things that fit within IBM's area of expertise spills over into other areas as well. Every DNA sequencing technique that's currently on the market relies on biological materials of one sort or another, but IBM has no particular experience with biologicals. So, its researchers are looking at a device that can be fabricated using its existing technology, and controls the reading of DNA sequences using three layers of metal deposited on a silicon chip, which could be produced by the company's fabs.

Investing in understanding a market

It's not obvious how many of these projects will eventually result in products, or whether IBM will be the company that benefits most from the basic research performed at its labs. But it is clear that the company starts these projects at the stage when significant basic research is still needed, and it's willing to invest even when there is no guarantee that the research will ever produce commercial dividends.

Its work in the biosciences is the clearest indication of this. There, the company didn't invest with the intention of necessarily selling a product so much as wanting to understand a market where the need for computing power is exploding. The biologists at Watson do perform research with some commercial value—doing predictions of the protection offered by flu vaccines as the virus evolves, for example—but the company has probably made more money selling the Blue Gene clusters that were developed to perform this work.

It's clear that not every company has the sort of budget that IBM does. But there are more than a handful of companies (some in the tech space) that have an annual income similar to that of Big Blue's, and could easily support something similar without significantly cutting into their profits. Running the lab clearly hasn't done the company much harm, and the output of its research has arguably helped put it where it is currently.

Despite that history, the current obsession with short-term profitability has driven most companies to either limit their R&D or not bother creating something like Watson as their profits grow. With the steady growth of federal spending on science and the ability to move intellectual property from universities to industry, the disappearance of this sort of long-term research from the corporate side hasn't had a large impact on US-based companies. But, with government spending shrinking, it may eventually catch up.

We'll have a few articles on some of the work we saw at Watson coming up over the next several weeks.